Machines

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Superhuman after all

Review: In the impressive follow-up to his blockbuster Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari suggests that humans' advantage over machines is a delusion – and that we may ultimately live in their shadow

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How personalisation could be changing your identity online

Attempts to model your web experience lead to fears of an echo chamber effect, but rather than reinforcing your sense of self, the process might be altering it

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How to invent a musical instrument

New technology yields new sounds, yet the instruments we play today are largely indebted to the past. So who's trying to make new ones?

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Thinking ahead

With consumers overwhelmed by choice, machines may soon choose and take action on their behalf

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Learning to read with Mr Robot

Projects to introduce robots into the classroom are being tested around the world. Could a new breed of social robots teach our children?

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AI: What else could intelligence be?

We design machines to think and act in ways that only mirror humans.​ That's too restrictive, limiting what AI might be capable of, says Alex Taylor

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Bumps in the road: The ultimate self-driving machine isn't here yet

Comment: Driverless cars are further away than the overexcited tech press would have you believe. Here's why

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Better nature

From bacteria repellant to flying robots, some of the best new ideas in design and engineering are taking inspiration from biology

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The blockchain, explained

​It's like a distributed ledger for convoluted analogies